Undergraduate

Real Characters

What does it mean to study another person’s life—a real person—and craft the collected pieces into a work of nonfiction? How can we write about them with authority? How do we turn people into nonfiction characters? As students report and write profiles in this nonfiction workshop, we will explore the practice and limits of this popular genre. Through weekly writing exercises and reading assignments, we will study different techniques of gathering facts--interviewing and observing subjects, using secondary sources, providing social and historical context. We will develop the abilities to depict people through physical detail, dialogue and action. In considering the extent to which we can and can’t know the real people we portray, we will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, sociologists, writers of case studies) address these limitations in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer, workshopped and revised profile.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:30-12:20
 

This course addresses a range of techniques for writing poetry, making use of various compelling models drawn primarily from international modernisms on which to base our own writing. (Our textbook is Poems for the Millennium, edited by Rothenberg & Joris.) In this sense, the course will constitute an apprenticeship to modern poetry. We will consider the breadth of approaches currently available to poets, as well as the value of reading as a means of developing an understanding of how to write poetry. Each week students will bring poems for discussion, developing a portfolio of revised work by the quarter’s end. Additionally, students will keep detailed notebooks, as well as developing critical skills for understanding poetry in the form of two short essays.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20
 

The Short Story

This class is an introduction to the writing of literary fiction. Our purpose will be to learn techniques that will help us to hone our skills as writers, observers, and thinkers. To that end, we will explore basic elements of fiction writing (plot, character, setting, point-of-view, dialogue, conflict, etc.) and read literature as writers. This means that we will be concerned foremost with how stories are crafted, and we will attempt to create a language in order to articulately describe what rivets us as readers. A strong component of this course is developing an appreciation of writing as a communal endeavor. As such, you are required to attend literary events in the community. As a member of a writing community, be prepared to respectfully read and respond to the work of others—both the work of students and published writers. Expect to invest a significant amount of time reading and writing inside and outside of class.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20

The Short Story

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” Through readings of published stories and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Carver, and Joy Williams as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Over the course of the quarter, students will submit full-length stories for consideration in workshop, as well as other experimental efforts in short-short and micro fiction. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of story craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which a narrative can be conveyed with economy, precision, and ultimately, power.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30-12:20

Afro-futurism has enjoyed a surge in popularity since the release of the film Black Panther, although the genre has been around for much longer and is just one example of a broader tradition of Africana speculative writing. In this course, we’ll read and analyze novels, film, music, and visual art that posit alternative histories, surrealistic dream states, and fantastical futures in the context of the black imaginary. We’ll attempt to navigate the many routes of the imagination—folklores, mythologies and cosmologies; histories and futures; politics, theories, and philosophies; and the material reality. You’ll be asked to read and analyze Africana speculative fiction in short papers. Then, using these works as models, you will write your own speculative fiction that engages both your imagination and material reality.  

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30-12:20
 

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even to spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter—and will be asked to produce works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Authors discussed may include Percy Bysshe Shelley, who called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," John Ruskin, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, James Agee and Walker Evans, Antonio Gramsci, James Baldwin, Amelia Rosselli, Rachel Carson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nanni Balestrini, Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, Mark Nowak, Layli Long Soldier, John Keene, Anne Boyer, and Craig Santos Perez.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 11:20–2:20 PM

Writers have long been fascinated, inspired, and puzzled by the visual arts. In this course, we will focus on two genres of writing—poetry and the essay—that have enjoyed long and productive relationships with painting, photography, sculpture, and other visual arts. What attracts writers to art? How might language render visual experience? How do verbal representations diverge from visual representations? How might writing help us see art in new ways? How might art objects compel our writing into new forms? With these questions in mind, we will read poems and essays by a variety of writers, visit several of Chicago’s excellent museums, and conduct regular writing experiments. Writers studied may include Berger, Williams, Auden, Barthes, Schuyler, Guest, O’Hara, Waldrop, Swensen, Gander, Young, and Cole. Artists studied may include Breughel, Magritte, Cornell, Twombly, Mann, Kentridge, and Basquiat.

Wednesday, 10:30-1:20 PM

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50